


Call It Magic When I'm With You

by narryworks



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 14:48:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4141812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narryworks/pseuds/narryworks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can hear the baby in the next room, hear the crying and the screaming clear as day and looks at his mother and even manages to quirk an eyebrow. His mother just widens her eyes and coughs a laugh in disbelief and looks straight over to his father. He notes down the reaction. After some discussion about how “he literally just looked at me with a quirked eyebrow” and many questions about “is he meant to do that yet?” they find their way to leaving the hospital. Niall found that being pushed out of his mum’s vagina was actually quite straining on his stamina and is left a bit tired, and decides to kip it out for the trip home. </p><p>He crawls by 2 weeks old, he walks by a month and he speaks when he’s 2 months old. </p><p>Niall’s extraordinary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Call It Magic When I'm With You

**Author's Note:**

> i havent checked this or anything... god sorry but i was gonna do a lot more but i just..... cba u know i aint feeling it so im publishing this and then maybe ill wanna do more u know aywnwayway bye

It’s a normal Monday when Niall is born. It’s bleak, it’s plain and it’s quiet. Quiet enough to at least be very Irish in that respect, but the room is quiet. Niall isn’t sure why he’s not crying, he’s also not sure why he’s so aware but he knows no different so he can’t be too alarmed. The rest of the people in the room do, though, and they’re very confused as to why Niall is so alert, so comfortable and so _quiet_. He does leave several doctors and nurses confused but once they double check he is actually breathing and is definitely alive and that he has no physical anomalies they hand him to his mother, Maura and let her and his father Bobby have time with their baby.  
The hospital room is as bland and about as colourful and lively as any other medical establishment, plain greys and pale blues merging into one mesh of colour, with the comfortable armchair in the corner, the table and the hospital bed and all the other typical hospital stuff in a room of the maternity ward that Niall isn’t sure about, but, you know, he’s a baby. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to be aware of.

He can hear the baby in the next room, hear the crying and the screaming clear as day and looks at his mother and even manages to quirk an eyebrow. His mother just widens her eyes and coughs a laugh in disbelief and looks straight over to his father. He notes down the reaction. After some discussion about how “he literally just looked at me with a quirked eyebrow” and many questions about “is he meant to do that yet?” they find their way to leaving the hospital. Niall found that being pushed out of his mum’s vagina was actually quite straining on his stamina and is left a bit tired, and decides to kip it out for the trip home.

He crawls by 2 weeks old, he walks by a month and he speaks when he’s 2 months old.

Niall’s extraordinary.

 

Niall’s first speech patterns were very parrot-like in the means that he just repeated whatever he heard when he chose to pay attention, so he listened to what someone was saying and then he repeated it. Which went from amusing to quite irritating to his parents in about 5 minutes, as you can imagine. They were also unsure how they were meant to explain to the midwife about his early learning when she came for Niall’s 3 month check-up, but they had no choice when he repeated that “no thanks, I don’t want tea but I’d love a coffee.”  
The midwife took some time to calm down, and he took some time to quirk his eyebrow. He does it a lot, now, it’s familiar and it’s become his signature move.  
“He does that all the time, too.” Maura notes to Lydia, the midwife, when Maura notices her take a visible step back.  
“He’s cheeky, isn’t he?” Lydia enquires, Maura just hums and smiles at Niall. He giggles and grabs his bottle and holds it in the air. He wants more milk.

The first time Niall speaks, not repeats, is at about 6 months. He had spoken before they’d heard him talk, he had managed to modify his repetitions to suit his own needs, but that wasn’t really speaking. He started that at 4 months.

“Do you want some more juice, Niall?”

“I want juice.”

The first time he spoke on his own accord, unprompted and uninfluenced was when he walked out of his bedroom, they had all moved into the spare room on the first floor as soon as Niall started walking. He had found his mother cooking breakfast.

“Where’s daddy?”

“Good morning, love. Daddy’s gone to work.” Maura isn’t surprised to find her tiny son walking out into the room asking questions. How could she be? Enough has already happened.

“Work?” and Niall stands still and looks up at his mother, his quirked eyebrow in full suit because he’s never heard of work.

“Yes, daddy has to go to work. He had paternity leave but it’s ran out,” Maura leans down and picks Niall up and sits him on the side near the cooker, “Daddy goes to work to earn money so we can buy things.”

“Work.” Niall repeats, more sure. He has a definition now, he’s saved it in his mind.

 

Niall’s progress is just as quick and he carries on defying odds and amazing people and Niall carries on being extraordinary.

 

Niall doesn't excel in school, not really. He gets taught at the same rate and although he absorbs the knowledge a lot quicker, at the lower years of school there’s only so much they teach so it just looks like he’s a good student. He knows everything as soon as he hears it, and can adapt and change the methods accordingly for harder or more advanced situations. He’s just as amazing, but with less capability to show it off, which is annoying because Niall loves to show off.

He surprises his parents though, they knew of his talents and knew that excelling or being good at things, better than others, could result in social out casting or even being bullied because his peers may get jealous of him. He was only in playschool, though, so maybe they were worried too soon. Their worries of him being unaccepted still rooted through even when he showed no signs of trouble at school. But when he has his 5th party and his whole class comes, they are definitely proven otherwise. Niall’s just good at, well, everything.

 

On his 6th birthday Niall gets a book. He doesn’t know that yet, though. He’s in his dining room where his presents are lined up on the table with other cards around it. They’re plain green table cloth covering the oak, the very loud, old-style floral wallpaper on the walls and the red carpet on the floor. He tries to pick it up, but it’s at least 12 inches wide by 15 inches tall and 3 inches thick. The book is heavy. Too heavy for a six year old.  
At this point, though, he still doesn’t know what it is. His parents are looming over him like shadows and are looking at each other trying to see if they can see who it’s from, see if they can decipher what the gift is themselves, but it’s covered in plain red wrapping paper with no card, no tag and no evidence of it ever making its way to the table.

Niall does the best he can to undress the book from where it is on the table, because he hasn’t got a chance of dancing it around in his palms while he rips off the extra layer. He pulls at the sides and pulls them out, making the paper into a mat for the book to rest on.  
  
It’s a book, we knew that. Niall just learned that. It’s a thick wooden casing, a hardback book made from oak and the carvings are intricate. Different waves and patterns dancing around the edges the spacing getting thicker the further your eyes travel inwards. The pattern stops around the centre, about an inch and a half up from the centre point. The blank space of rectangle stretching at about an inch height by 5 inches wide. The blankness over taken by an engraving. It spells words, it’s the title.

“ _Na Cinn Níos Mó_ ”

“What does that mean?” Niall sends his mother and father a look, quirking his eyebrow like he did when he was younger. They just shrug back, they’re not sure.

Maura and Bobby spend some time trying to decipher who it was from, lugging the book around and checking every side and all the cards and deciding that, yeah, they definitely don’t know who or where this book came from.

Bobby, reluctantly and with great difficulty, moves the book into Niall’s room on a small table at the end of his bed. His bed is in the centre of his room, surrounded with thick carpet, his walls a pale green and his wardrobe lining the right side of his bed, the window on the other surrounded by football curtains.  
He ignores it for the rest of day, going to his birthday party in the early afternoon and seemingly forgetting about it. His parents just ignored it, it can’t be anything dangerous, it’s a book that the boy can’t even pick up.

He doesn’t acknowledge it again until he’s drove into his room by his parents, he changes into his pyjamas and is lying in bed. He saw it while he was getting changed, his arms lugging over his head pulling on his top and nearly falling face first into the table while he was bending his knees and balancing on one leg pulling on his bottoms, but he saw it. And now he wants to open it, he hasn’t even looked at it.

He swiftly moves and hangs his legs over the edge of his bed and shuffles off, walking round his bed and kneeling in front of the table. The words from earlier back in front of him.  
He whispers it to himself, “na cinn níos mó”, and he swears he feels a spark in his right hand. It feels like an intense feeling of pins and needles in one straight shot and slowly makes its way up and out through each of his fingers. He feels it making its way up the route, lifts his hand and puts it in front of his face and studies the back of his hand and his palm, until it stops.  
It feels so much like something happened, the overwhelming feeling that something important just happened and this is the beginning of something incredible but he just doesn’t know what.

He grabs at a large portion of the pages, and clumps it in his hand with the front cover, losing a few and dropping them from his hand until he has an adequate amount and can actually lift it and open the book.  
The writings small, the sentences on the lines not being an more than a quarter of a centimetre, maybe less. They are a lot of words. Niall’s only young, he hasn’t seen a book with so many words per page before and can’t help his eyes widening, his jaw going slack and his eyebrows rising.  
Upon further inspection, leaning in and really getting a good look at the pages he realises he doesn’t understand it. Mounds and mounds of words he’s never seen, and Niall’s a good reader he can at least recognise every word he’s ever seen and he has never seen any of these before.

“ _Lig Dom A Ardú_ _\- Dóibh siúd ar mian leo a bheith i measc na réaltaí, i measc na n-éan agus i measc iad siúd i na spéartha a rá na focail seo agus beidh tú ag ardú, beidh tú a ardú go dtí go bhfuil tú leo._

_Tá an seal do dhaoine ar mian leo levitate nó snámh. Beidh an litrithe a dhéanann tú a ardú méadar san aer agus is féidir leat bogadh thart ar an airde mar is mian leat. Is é an airde réamhshocraithe anseo ag méadar amháin ach más mian leat a bheith níos airde nó níos ísle, beidh d'intinn tú a threorú. Nuair is mian leat a thabhairt ar ais ar an talamh a bheidh tú cheana ann._ ”

Niall just can’t, even with every piece of his attention, understand any of what the book says. He flips through pages and pages, all of them the same set up as this one and he has no choice but to give up. So he closes the book, stands up and makes his way back into bed. He sighs and then he tries to get a good night’s sleep.

 

He tells his parents about it the next day, the weird words and how he doesn’t understand it. How it’s all words and phrases and language that he has never seen before, that he hasn’t even heard about before.

“I looked at it before I went to sleep, mammy. The words didn’t make any sense, look,” he speaks with a questioning tone, he’s sure that he definitely doesn’t understand it but it could just be a bit more advanced then he’s aware. He grabs his mother’s hand and tries, try being the key word as he is only small and his mother is, small for an adult, but tall for a 6 year old boy. He leads her into his bedroom and opens the book to one of the first few pages, saving the struggling of bearing a massive weight of a handful of pages just to open a book.

“Yeah, dear. That’s not English, is it?” she asks. Niall knows that it isn’t really a question, she’s the adult here and if anyone was going to know if this was English or if it wasn’t, it was going to be her. “I’m not sure but looking at the long passages,” she motions to the definition looking sections of the pages so Niall can be sure what she means by ‘passages’, “And these first bits it does look a bit Irish. I haven’t done Irish since school and even then we didn’t even do much, but it could be.”

Niall’s only 6, he feels he needs to remind his mother because he’s not entirely sure if she is aware that he doesn’t actually know that there is more than one language, or that he doesn’t know how he is supposed to be in the know about them. He can barely even speak English yet.

His father returns from work later on, and verifies that to them both that it is definitely Irish, he remembers from school. And after some internet searching he can double-verify it. Niall isn’t sure about it, but he has to take their word for it. He knows he’s Irish, but not that Irish was a language, too. Which gets him thinking.

He lifts his head and looks back from his mother to his father, and then back to his mother again. They’re in his living room, now, the television being the main focus of attention before Niall made himself into the place of interest by lifting his head and looking towards his parents. There’s only the three of them, so they only have an arm chair and a sofa. Niall learnt from a younger age that his father always claimed the arm chair and often found himself sharing the sofa with his mother. They’re nice, for this sort of house. All solid, dark red’s that match, they must’ve been a set. The rest of the room is sort of what you would normally expect from a grandmother’s house, Niall doesn’t see much difference between her house and his. The carpet is a loud floral pattern, mostly dark blues, blacks and the rare placement of purples and reds, the wall paper looks like it was white and was stained yellow with a tea bag and someone drew some pattern on it, it wasn’t, though. Niall knows that but can’t help but think that’s how it actually came about. The rooms in Niall’s house aren’t stylish or themed, they’re a mix and match in the main basis, but he likes it. They feel cosy and homely, not like some housing DIY shop advert. He furrows his brows, before quirking one up and Maura and Bobby know a question is coming.

“If we’re from Ireland, how come we don’t speak Irish?”  

There isn’t a response for at least a few seconds, both his parents trying to think of why and how to explain it and Niall just sits and patiently waits, which is very uncommon for him as he is always at least fidgeting and playing with his sleeves, or biting his nails or something else but he might just be tired.

“Well, some people may still speak Irish but sometimes languages just come and go, you know?” Niall doesn’t, obviously, but he nods anyway.

“I don’t think it’s that, Maura.” Bobby offers his counter argument, “I think some people from England came over, and took over Ireland so it was under English rule. And then made it mandatory to speak English. That’s probably why, Niall. It’s not all that important to know.” He pauses for a second. “You could always learn Irish, if you wanted to.”

“Can I?” Niall widens his eyes, the prospect of being able to speak another language and being able to actually read his book coming to mind, “that means I can read that book I have! Please, can I?”

“Sure,” Bobby looks to Maura, who just nods him on. “You can if you want.”

“Yes!” Niall screams. He’s excited, to say the least.

 

It takes about two weeks for Niall to actually force his parents to get him a tutor for Irish because for some reason they expected it to be a fad and for him to change his mind at any given moment. He reminded them that they promised to let him for about an hour a day at least once, but not at most, and they finally gave in and Niall made sure to watch them browse the internet and find a local tutor for a good price and he watched them make the call and set up his first lesson. He’s more than fifty percent sure he’ll find his parents making more hollow promises, but he reckons if he sticks to his guns as much as he did this time round he shouldn’t really have a problem making them stay true to their own.

They have a mild conversation filled with some light hearted threats about how if he doesn’t stick to this after he’s making them fork out all this money they’ll “never let him have anything else in his life, not even birthdays or Christmas’”. So, Niall promises he’ll do it for at least 6 months, hopefully more. He’s already been informed about how learning a language is actually a lot of work and he shouldn’t be expecting to know too much so soon.  But, what they should know by now is that Niall isn’t like everyone else, he’s Niall and Niall’s extraordinary.

 

The tutoring session begins about 4 days later, it turns out the boy is not a lot older than Niall. He’s older, though, a young adult. He’s only 16, so he’s mature enough to obviously find a route to get his own money from offering services he can provide. Niall’s parents agreed to have someone of this age so it didn’t seem like an adult trying to put themselves down onto Niall’s age, instead it was still a kid, just one who knew what he was doing.

Niall likes him because his hair looks like fire.

“Hey pal, I’m Ed. I take it you’re Niall?” the boy, Ed, asks. He leans out from behind Niall’s mum before he talks, Maura leading him in to meet Niall in their living room, his classroom for the next hour.

“Yeah, that’s me.” Niall steps up out of his chair to greet Ed, how he’s been taught. A firm handshake, a smile and kind gestured eye contact.

“Shall we just get to it then? I think your parents would appreciate it if I taught you quickly, eh?” Ed looks up and winks at Maura who just breathes a laugh out, and tells Niall to behave before leaving.

  

He learns at a steady pace for the next year, seemingly forgetting about the book even though it was his main drive to learn his new language, alongside school and alongside everything else in his life he still managed to ace it. Ed would always spread his praise to his parents and anyone else he could see in the room, saying “there’s no way he should be able to do all this yet,” “it took me at least five times as long to get this,” and the infamous “Niall’s extraordinary.”  
By the time Niall is 7 and a half years old, he is able to speak and understand Irish to the same degree as a GCSE student, and he could pass an exam with almost a perfect score. He does pass an exam with a perfect score.

Ed decides to find some past papers on the internet, which is harder than he thought it would be because it turns out Irish really isn’t as common as he thought it was, but he manages to whip up a few and Niall takes each hour-long test in 15 minutes and gets perfect grades on them all.

It doesn’t take a lot to be able to pass a GCSE exam, though, it’s all formal language and simple verbs. He needs to be able to be fluent to native level and be able to understand complex sentence structures, he realises it’ll take a lot longer than he hoped even with his amazing learning.

It’s a Monday when Ed comes round for their normal tutoring session, since Niall proved he could do outstanding things they moved their 2 times a week session to 3 times, and now Ed comes round on any 3 days they agree on but mostly Monday, Wednesday and Friday so he still has his weekend, and so Niall still has his weekends. Sometimes Ed has to miss a week, or a few, because he recently had his exams- him being 16 and all. Now that he’s turned 17, even half way into the year, he’s still getting used to college work, he’s doing music performance and it’s a lot of practise, a lot of writing and a lot work. He stills tries to manage Niall in though.

They have their normal session, cutting it slightly short because the lesson wasn’t all that long, Ed decided that because Niall had told him early on that he was learning Irish to read a book he had that that should be their main focus, really, once he got all the basics and maybe the advanced stuff down that they would head for the more specific focus of learning to read a book. Ed’s parents are who made him learn Irish so he was brought up with it as a native, even though it’s technically a second language, and they have “thousands of Irish book laying around, I’ll bring some round for you to try to read.”  
It’s been a while since they agreed on the new focus and Niall is a lot better than Ed anticipated, reading with little to no problems.

The books are an old style and have weird phrases and complex structures in the sentences, which he could work around and hopes will help me in his reading his new book. Even though the book was his main focus, Niall falls in love with Ireland and the language, he always loved his home country and is patriotic, a big fan of sports and sitting with his dad cheering on Ireland in the rugby, football and even the occasional Irish golfer on the television. If someone Irish was in it, that was Niall’s favourite team or person.  He loves being able to show off in class, knowing how to speak another language and talking about people right in front of them, saying only good things about them, of course. For now at least. So when Niall finds out that his favourite country isn’t going to be _his_ country anymore, he takes it pretty hard. Very hard, in fact. It feels like someone is ripping his heart out.

 

“Niall, can you come downstairs, please?”

“Niall?”

It’s the second call that pulls Niall out from his book, one that Ed left him to read. It’s a story about a boy venturing deep into a forest and finding a rock with the words “ _do féadfaidh an t-ardú medicine agus féadfaidh theman titim taobh istigh._ ”and that’s about as far as he got before he was interrupted by his mum.

“Coming.” He pulls himself up off his bed, often choosing to lay down when reads because it’s comfortable, that’s pretty much the only reason.  
He leaves his room and runs down the stairs and goes into the living room to find his parents both on the sofa, away from their usual spots and both have pretty stern mouths, neither one even remotely smiling. Niall would be worried if he wasn’t so confused.

“Uh, are you guys okay?” Niall feels almost contractually obliged to ask, the atmosphere in the room so tense, and unknowing.

Maura lets out a sigh before she replies, almost apologetically. “Niall, we need to talk to you.” She leaves a little pause, and lets Niall move round to sit down on the open arm chair, only onto the edge of the seat, leaning forward to make sure he’s as focussed as he can be on his parents. Not that he couldn’t be, the TV isn’t even on.

“Your father, uh-" Maura runs a hand through her hair instead of finishing her sentence.

“I got a job offer, to work for a lot more money and a higher position, and we want to run it past you.” Niall doesn’t really understand why his dad feels the need to ask him permission to get a job, he’s a 7 year old, nearly 8, he’s not really in any position to tell a grown man what to do.

Niall lets his questions show, let’s himself look visibly confused, lips almost frowning at the edges, and his eyebrows furrowed. Not even quirked like he usually does. The older two notice that Niall doesn’t really understand what they’re on about, or why they’re on about it to him.

“It’s in England, Niall.”

It feels like a dream, something that didn’t happen and it was just his imagination. It feels like there’s no possible way that what he just heard came from anyone’s mouth from anyone who is in the room. If anything, at most, it must be a joke. Niall thinks it’s a joke so he starts laughing, getting into it and throwing his head back, clutching his stomach with his mouth in a wide open smile but it’s not genuine. His eyes are strained because he knows it’s fake, it’s not a joke and his eyes are glassy and watering over and he feels his stomach and his heart sinking lower with each second when he notices neither of his parents are laughing. That they look sad, that they look sympathetic, so Niall stops laughing.

“What?” Niall asks, whispers at most. Small and quiet and he’d give anything to know how vulnerable he sounds. It’s not a real question, anyone could tell it wasn’t a real question. It’s all he can work out because everything in his life is about to change, his house will be gone, his friends will be gone and he’ll have to work everything from the bottom again and he’ll have to start over. His eyes are still like glass, shiny and covered in the thinnest layer of water but he’s not crying, he won’t cry. His heart is breaking, his stomach is falling but he’s not crying. He won’t.

“I’m going to tell my boss that I agree to the position tomorrow, Niall. I’m not sure when we’ll be moving, but it won’t be bad. It’ll all be okay, alright?” It sounds like a promise to Niall’s ear but he’s in too much shock to really notice.  
His mum walks over and picks him up, lets him wrap his arms around her neck, his legs around her waist and he buries his head into her neck. He’d give anything to feel like he wasn’t as small and fragile as he feels right now.

 

 

Niall isn’t 8 until they leave. It was only a few months later but it gave Niall time to say goodbye to all his friends and gave him all the closure he never thought he’d have. It wasn’t a massive venture anymore, it felt like a right move, literally. It was his, and the right, next step to take. He was young and everything felt like a huge difference, a new country, a new school, a new house and it all got the better of him. But after some talks with his parents they settled him and persuaded him and convinced him it was for the best. And if anything, although his mind was racing and he was shaking, he was excited for what was to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

   


 


End file.
